The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
and Protestant, were so alike as to seem virtually indistinguishable.’ 27 In
this way, both Protestant and Catholic had stakes in the salvation economy.
Nonetheless, in ‘the Evangelical century’ it was Protestant evangelicals
of Nonconformity who were critical, exerting an influence well beyond
their numbers. 28 Evangelicalism was the crucible for both personal
redemption and for social policy to solve urban–industrial problems. As
Bebbington has rightly stated, ‘it called for souls to be saved one by one,
and yet held up standards of a just society that could often be imposed
only at the expense of individual freedom’. 29 Evangelicalism provided a
complex model for a democratic and harmonious society. As such, the
salvation revolution was no middle-class monopoly as too many historians
have portrayed it. From its very inception in the 1790s and 1800s, it was
interacting with the formation of bourgeois and plebeian identities in equal
measure. And the means by which it did this was the salvation industry.
THE SALVATION INDUSTRY
Whatever arguments continued after 1800 about the role of the state in the
nation’s religious life, evangelicalism placed the responsibility for collective
moral action at the door of the free moral agents of a ‘democratic’,
individualistic society. It was to them that the construction of the salvation
industry devolved.
The starting point was the congregation. The congregation became
characterised not merely as a body of people who met on a Sunday for
worship, but as a centre of social faith. The congregation was composed
of voluntary organisations which emerged from the 1780s and 1790s with
the dedicated aim of rescuing for Christ the adult ‘lapsed masses’, the
young, and the native peoples of Britain’s emerging empire. The individual
did this firstly through giving money and secondly through giving time to
work as Sunday school teachers, tract distributors, collectors, penny-bank
organisers, and supporters of literally hundreds of other religious voluntary
organisations. The bulk of these organisations became congregationally
based though others were interdenominational local organisations for a
given city or town. The voluntary organisation became the hallmark of
modern religion. 30 It defined belonging, and it defined exclusion. A vast
new territory was formed to which were entrusted the meanings of ‘being
religious’ and ‘being irreligious’.
The congregation was a club. Getting into it defined one state of ‘being
religious’; being excluded or, worse, ejected from it defined one state of
‘being irreligious’. Being a member of another ‘club’ met with varying
degrees of approval depending on whether it was doctrinally and socially
in close affinity; some clubs were beyond the pale for being distant in
belief and practice and some for being too close, especially when they were
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